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Book review: Munich by Robert Harris

Much-maligned Neville Chamberlain is the hero of a brilliantly imagined thriller

Review by Dominic Sandbrook

Harris: his cleverness and eye for detail are second to noneDAVID HARTLEY/REX FEATURES

The Sunday Times, September 17 2017, 12:01am

Robert Harris’s latest thriller opens on September 27, 1938, with the newspapers full of Adolf Hitler’s demands for the German-speaking Sudetenland to be ceded by Czechoslovakia. War seems inevitable: in St James’s Park, a crowd watches silently as a silver barrage balloon floats past the spire of Big Ben.

At the Ritz, meanwhile, a young Foreign Office aide, Hugh Legat, has booked a table to celebrate his wedding anniversary. The atmosphere is awkward: his wife is late, and he suspects her of infidelity. He has brought her a ring. But when he opens the cardboard box she brings, he sees only the “black rubber skull” of a gas mask. She apologetically explains that she has taken their children for a fitting, just in case.